Book Review: As Southern As It Gets

Title:  As Southern as It Gets

Author: H. Jackson Brown

Date: 2017

Publisher: Nelson

ISBN: 978-0718098100

Length: 224 pages

Quote: "Grandmother's handwritten recipes."

Talk about short, easy-reading books. Well, on the Internet, there’s the list as article, or “listicle.” This book is a list as book—a listook? Lisk? A person’s name or a recipe name is a paragraph. 

This is a long list of memory triggers for Southerners. Long, but incomplete. “Dale Earnhardt. Dale Earnhardt Jr.” The mind goes to “Davey Allison.” That’s not on the page. (Davey Allison, a young, popular NASCAR driver from Alabama, died in a helicopter accident one summer when Dale Earnhardt Jr. was in middle school.) And Lake Speed, the name used by an actual driver who raced with them that summer, later the name given to a lake in North Carolina near the homes of several NASCAR stars, is also not on this list. Richard Petty, I’m glad to see, is on the list, right before Ricky Skaggs. 

The list is not given in consistent alphabetical order or any other kind of order. Items seem to have been added just as they occurred to the author (and presumably some of his friends). The book could have been written to order for gift shops from Texas to Maryland, where it's likely to be on the shelves, and will remind visitors what not to miss.

If you try to analyze this book, it’s political in a very subtle, polite, Southern way. The point of these lists is that the Southern States cover a lot of territory, geographically and otherwise. People who can be described as Southerners do not necessarily look or sound alike, nor do all of us relate to all of these memories in the same way, nor are all of these memories really exclusively Southern. “Southern” includes all three corners of Virginia—three different cultural and ecological places—similarly cornered North Carolina, culturally distinct South Carolina,, both halves of Georgia plus Atlanta and the islands, Florida, the self-styled “three States of Tennessee,” Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Cherokee Town, Seminole territory in Florida, arguably Texas and Oklahoma, and, more arguably, Maryland and Kentucky. Southerners are Black, White, Red, and also Cuban, Puerto Rican, West Indian, and Cajun. Most let themselves be culturally defined by a religious identity; some have none. We have furious diversity. 

The rest of the country used to goad us with insinuations that we all sounded alike. Even now that television is breaking up the different dialects we learned from our elders, Southerners do not sound alike to our own ears. A “Southern accent” generally means one of a wide range of ways people speak English as a first language; for some Southerners English is still a second language. “Southern accents” identify socioeconomic classes as well as regions, and pack enough social-political baggage that you used to hear young Southerners speaking BBC English to communicate that we wanted to opt out of that whole mess.

My natural sister and I grew up in the same place but don’t sound like it. I have paid enough attention to the politics of practical linguistics to understand why we sound so different; we chose two ways to make a statement about rejecting snobbery. Growing up in Virginia, we heard our elders say things that they would correct us for saying to them. At school we were told that those ways of speaking were “wrong.” (I had only one teacher who went so far as to scold people for saying "thuh" instead of "thee," and "a-gan" instead of "a-gayne," in sentences like "Excuse me, Ma'am, the sink is stopped up again." Most teachers had relaxed on those points.) Saying things like "ain't," or "ya" for "you" or "I'm gonna" for "I shall," were the way people who had grown up in dreary little tract houses near factories, or in mining camps, or similar, were expected to speak. They were the way our elders would speak to the yardman to communicate acceptance and understanding. They were “wrong” for use among our own socioeconomic class. Feh, who needs! Kids mostly spoke "wrong" and let the teachers scold, figuring that scolding was teachers' favorite thing anyway. I married a diplomat and usually speak the way white-collar White Americans in Washington speak; when I had a mild head cold I was told I could pass for a native of Maryland. My sister married a coal miner’s son and sounds to me as if she’d grown up, with major hearing loss (which she has), in a coal camp. You could say that I speak to yardmen the same way I do to teachers, and my sister speaks to teachers the same way she speaks, or they speak, to yardmen.

“Southern” includes those diverse socioeconomic indicators, too, of course. We like to think of “class” as merely a matter of courtesy, equally available to rich and poor. It’s not, of course. A venerable cultural tradition has always allowed rich Southerners to copy some points of style from the lower classes, and considered this cute. That tradition merged into the twentieth century European fad for artists and designers to “take their inspiration from the streets.” So it’s none too surprising that people like Jeff Foxworthy, Lewis Grizzard, to some extent even President and Mrs. Carter, whose manners drip “background,” can charmingly affect “redneck” or blue-collar styles. Up to a certain point that sort of thing has always been considered adorable but you have to know where to stop. Actually being poor, or even fanatically frugal, is not considered nearly so cute as affecting blue-collar styles while wealthy. Actually being Yankee-ish...well, there's a reason Hillary Clinton moved to New York instead of pursuing her political career in Arkansas. 

But here’s a mix that at least tries to represent everybody, and if it’s a little heavy on the shrimp for my taste, it most definitely succeeds in getting Southerners to share memories from the twentieth century in which we grew up, without breaking down in division between those who did and did not have Confederate ancestors. And these memories include more sports, music, and pop culture, so they’re less fattening than an equally unifying Southern Living cookbook.

This Daughter of the Confederacy appreciates the author’s intentions. Pride in our own great-grandfathers is all very well; I don’t imagine my great-grandfather would have wanted his memory used to make perfectly nice people who are only third-generation Southerners feel left out of things. Black beans go just fine with cornbread. 

Checking the Amazon page, I note that somebody grumbled that he could have written an equally long list of things he likes about being a Northerner. Well, for pity's sake, why doesn't he?